Krebs on Security

Banks: Card Breach at Trump Hotel Properties

July 1, 2015

The Trump Hotel Collection, a string of luxury hotel properties tied to business magnate and now Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, appears to be the latest victim of a credit card breach, according to data shared by several U.S.-based banks.

Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.

Contacted regarding reports from sources at several banks who traced a pattern of fraudulent debit and credit card charges to accounts that had all been used at Trump hotels, the company declined multiple requests for comment.

Update, 4:56 p.m. ET: The Trump Organization just acknowledged the issue with a brief statement from Eric Trump, executive vice president of development and acquisitions: “Like virtually every other company these days, we have been alerted to potential suspicious credit card activity and are in the midst of a thorough investigation to determine whether it involves any of our properties,” the statement reads. “We are committed to safeguarding all guests’ personal information and will continue to do so vigilantly.”

Original story:

But sources in the financial industry say they have little doubt that Trump properties in several U.S. locations — including Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York — are dealing with a card breach that appears to extend back to at least February 2015.

If confirmed, the incident would be the latest in a long string of credit card breaches involving hotel brands, restaurants and retail establishments. In March, upscale hotel chain Mandarin Oriental disclosed a compromise. The following month, hotel franchising firm White Lodging acknowledged that, for the second time in 12 months, card processing systems at several of its locations were breached by hackers.

It is likely that the huge number of card breaches at U.S.-based organizations over the past year represents a response by fraudsters to upcoming changes in the United States designed to make credit and debit cards more difficult and expensive to counterfeit. Non-chip cards store cardholder data on a magnetic stripe, which can be trivially copied and re-encoded onto virtually anything else with a magnetic stripe. Continue reading →

Crooks Use Hacked Routers to Aid Cyberheists

June 29, 2015

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Cybercriminals have long relied on compromised Web sites to host malicious software for use in drive-by download attacks, but at least one crime gang is taking it a step further: New research shows that crooks spreading the Dyre malware for use in cyberheists are leveraging hacked wireless routers to deliver their password-stealing crimeware.

Ubiquity Networks airRouter

Dyre (a.k.a. “Dyreza”) is generally installed by a downloader Trojan that is flagged by most tools under the name “Upatre.” The latter is most often delivered via malicious e-mails containing a link which directs unsuspecting users to servers hosting malicious javascript or a basic redirection to a malicious payload. If the user clicks the malicious link, it may serve a bogus file — such as an invoice or bank statement — that if extracted and opened reaches out to an Upatre control server to download Dyre.

According to a recent in-depth report from Symantec, Dyre is a highly developed piece of malware, capable of hijacking all three major web browsers and intercepting internet banking sessions in order to harvest the victim’s credentials and send them to the attackers. Dyre is often used to download additional malware on to the victim’s computer, and in many cases the victim machine is added to a botnet which is then used to send out thousands of spam emails in order to spread the threat.

Recently, researchers at the Fujitsu Security Operations Center in Warrington, UK began tracking Upatre being served from hundreds of compromised home routers — particularly routers powered by MikroTik and Ubiquiti’s AirOS.

“We have seen literally hundreds of wireless access points, and routers connected in relation to this botnet, usually AirOS,” said Bryan Campbell, lead threat intelligence analyst at Fujitsu. “The consistency in which the botnet is communicating with compromised routers in relation to both distribution and communication leads us to believe known vulnerabilities are being exploited in the firmware which allows this to occur.”

Continue reading →

A Busy Week for Ne’er-Do-Well News

June 27, 2015

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We often hear about the impact of cybercrime, but too seldom do we read about the successes that law enforcement officials have in apprehending those responsible and bringing them to justice. Last week was an especially busy time for cybercrime justice, with authorities across the globe bringing arrests, prosecutions and some cases stiff sentences in connection with a broad range of cyber crimes, including ATM and bank account cashouts, malware distribution and “swatting” attacks.

Ercan Findikoglu, posing with piles of cash.

Prosecutors in New York had a big week. Appearing in the U.S. court system for the first time last week was Ercan “Segate” Findikoglu, a 33-year-old Turkish man who investigators say was the mastermind behind a series of Oceans 11-type ATM heists between 2011 and 2013 that netted thieves more than $55 million.

According to prosecutors, Findikoglu organized the so-called “ATM cashouts” by hacking into networks of several credit and debit card payment processors. With each processor, the intruders were able to simultaneously lift the daily withdrawal limits on numerous prepaid accounts and dramatically increase the account balances on those cards to allow ATM withdrawals far in excess of the legitimate card balances.

The cards were then cloned and sent to dozens of co-conspirators around the globe, who used the cards at ATMs to withdraw millions in cash in the span of just a few hours. Investigators say these attacks are known in the cybercrime underground as “unlimited operations” because the manipulation of withdrawal limits lets the crooks steal literally unlimited amounts of cash until the operation is shut down.

Two of the attacks attributed to Findikoglu and his alleged associates were first reported on this blog, including a February 2011 attack against Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), and a $5 million heist in late 2012 involving a card network in India. The most brazen and lucrative heist, a nearly $40 million cashout against the Bank of Muscat in Oman, was covered in a May 2013 New York Times piece, which concludes with a vignette about the violent murder of alleged accomplice in the scheme.

Also in New York, a Manhattan federal judge sentenced the co-creator of the “Blackshades” Trojan to nearly five years in prison after pleading guilty to helping hundreds of people use and spread the malware. Twenty-five year old Swedish national Alexander Yucel was ordered to forfeit $200,000 and relinquish all of the computer equipment he used in commission of his crimes.

As detailed in this May 2014 piece, Blackshades Users Had It Coming, the malware was sophisticated but marketed mainly on English language cybecrime forums to young men who probably would have a hard time hacking their way out of a paper bag, let alone into someone’s computer. Initially sold via PayPal for just $40, Blackshades offered users a way to remotely spy on victims, and even included tools and tutorials to help users infect victim PCs. Many of Yucel’s customers also have been rounded up by law enforcement here in the U.S. an abroad. Continue reading →

Hershey Park Investigates Card Fraud Pattern

June 24, 2015

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Hershey Park, a popular resort and amusement park in Hershey, Pa. has hired a security firm to investigate reports from multiple financial institutions about a possible credit card breach, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Contacted after reports by several financial institutions about a pattern of fraudulent charges on customer cards that trace back to Hershey properties, the company says it is investigating.

“We have received reports from some of our guests that fraud charges appeared on their payment cards after they visited our property,” said Kathleen McGraw, director of communications for Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Company.

“We take reports like this very seriously,” McGraw continued. “While our company does have security measures in place designed to prevent unauthorized access to our network, we immediately began to investigate our system for signs of an issue and engaged an external computer security firm to assist us. The investigation is ongoing.”

Sources at three financial institutions say they have detected a pattern of fraudulent activity on customer cards that were used at Hershey properties in Pennsylvania between mid-March and late May 2015. According to the banks, the cards were used at a variety of Hershey locations, including food and beverage outlets, ticketing stations and the Hershey Lodge.

Emergency Patch for Adobe Flash Zero-Day

June 23, 2015

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Adobe Systems Inc. today released an emergency update to fix a dangerous security hole in its widely-installed Flash Player browser plugin. The company warned that the vulnerability is already being exploited in targeted attacks, and urged users to update the program as quickly as possible.

In an advisory issued Tuesday morning, Adobe said the latest version of Flash — v. 18.0.0.194 on Windows and Mac OS X — fixes a critical flaw (CVE-2015-3113) that is being actively exploited in “limited, targeted attacks.” The company said systems running Internet Explorer for Windows 7 and below, as well as Firefox on Windows XP, are known targets of these exploits. Continue reading →

A Month Without Adobe Flash Player

June 23, 2015

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I’ve spent the better part of the last month running a little experiment to see how much I would miss Adobe‘s buggy and insecure Flash Player software if I removed it from my systems altogether. Turns out, not so much.

Browser plugins are favorite targets for malware and miscreants because they are generally full of unpatched or undocumented security holes that cybercrooks can use to seize complete control over vulnerable systems. The Flash Player plugin is a stellar example of this: It is among the most widely used browser plugins, and it requires monthly patching (if not more frequently).

It’s also not uncommon for Adobe to release emergency fixes for the software to patch flaws that bad guys started exploiting before Adobe even knew about the bugs. This happened most recently in February 2015, and twice the month prior. Adobe also shipped out-of-band Flash fixes in December and November 2014.

Update, 11:30 a.m. ET: Oddly enough, Adobe just minutes ago released an out-of-band patch to fix a zero-day flaw in Flash.

Original story:

Time was, Oracle’s Java plugin was the favorite target of exploit kits, software tools made to be stitched into hacked or malicious sites and foist on visiting browsers a kitchen sink of exploits for various plugin vulnerabilities. Lately, however, it seems to pendulum has swung back in favor of exploits for Flash Player. A popular exploit kit known as Angler, for example, bundled a new exploit for a Flash vulnerability just three days after Adobe fixed it in April 2015.

So, rather than continue the patch madness and keep this insecure software installed, I decided to the pull the…er…plugin. I tend to (ab)use different browsers for different tasks, and so uninstalling the plugin was almost as simple as uninstalling Flash, except with Chrome, which bundles its own version of Flash Player. Fear not: disabling Flash in Chrome is simple enough. On a Windows, Mac, Linux or Chrome OS installation of Chrome, type “chrome:plugins” into the address bar, and on the Plug-ins page look for the “Flash” listing: To disable Flash, click the disable link (to re-enable it, click “enable”).

In almost 30 days, I only ran into just two instances where I encountered a site hosting a video that I absolutely needed to watch and that required Flash (an instructional video for a home gym that I could find nowhere else, and a live-streamed legislative hearing). For these, I opted to cheat and load the content into a Flash-enabled browser inside of a Linux virtual machine I have running inside of VirtualBox. In hindsight, it probably would have been easier simply to temporarily re-enable Flash in Chrome, and then disable it again until the need arose. Continue reading →

“Free” Proxies Aren’t Necessarily Free

June 22, 2015

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Netflix, Hulu and a host of other content streaming services block non-U.S. users from viewing their content. As a result, many people residing in or traveling outside of the United States seek to circumvent such restrictions by using services that advertise “free” and “open” Web proxies capable of routing browser traffic through U.S.-based computers and networks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, new research suggests that most of these “free” offerings are anything but, and actively seek to weaken browser security and privacy.

The data comes from Austrian researcher and teacher Christian Haschek, who published a simple script to check 443 open Web proxies (no, that number was not accidental). His script tries to see if a given proxy allows encrypted browser traffic (https://), and whether the proxy tries to modify site content or inject any content into the user’s browser session, such as ads or malicious scripts.

Haschek found that 79 percent of the proxies he tested forced users to load pages in unencrypted (http://) mode, meaning the owners of those proxies could see all of the traffic in plain text.

“It could be because they want you to use http so they can analyze your traffic and steal your logins,” Haschek said. “If I’m a good guy setting up a server so that people can use it to be secure and anonymous, I’m going to allow people to use https. But what is my motive if I tell users http only?”

Haschek’s research also revealed that slightly more than 16 percent of the proxy servers were actively modifying static HTML pages to inject ads.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) allow users to tunnel their encrypted traffic to different countries, but increasingly online content providers are blocking popular VPN services as well. Tor offers users the ability to encrypt and tunnel traffic for free, but in my experience the service isn’t reliably fast enough to stream video. Continue reading →

OPM’s Database for Sale? Nope, It Came from Another US .Gov

June 18, 2015

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A database supposedly from a sample of information stolen in the much publicized hack at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has been making the rounds in the cybercrime underground, with some ne’er-do-wells even offering to sell it as part of a larger package. But a review of the information made available as a teaser indicates that the database is instead a list of users stolen from a different government agency — Unicor.gov, also known as Federal Prison Industries.

Source: Unicor.gov

Earlier this week, miscreants who frequent the Hell cybercrime forum (a “Deep Web” site reachable only via the Tor network) began passing around a text file that contained more than 23,000 records which appeared to be a user database populated exclusively by user accounts with dot-gov email addresses. I thought it rather unlikely that the file had anything to do with the OPM hack, which was widely attributed to Chinese hackers who are typically interested in espionage — not selling the data they steal on open-air markets.

As discussed in my Oct. 2014 post, How to Tell Data Leaks from Publicity Stunts, there are several simple techniques that often can be used to tell whether a given data set is what it claims to be. One method involves sampling email addresses from the leaked/hacked database and then using them in an attempt to create new accounts at the site in question. In most cases, online sites and services will allow only one account per email address, so if a large, random sampling of email addresses from the database all come back as already registered at the site you suspect is the breached entity, then it’s a safe guess the data came from that entity.

How to know the identity of the organization from which the database was stolen? In most cases, database files list the users in the order in which they registered on the site. As a result, the email addresses and/or usernames for the first half-dozen or more users listed in the database are most often from the database administrators and/or site designers. When all of those initial addresses have the same top-level domain — in this case “unicor.gov” — it’s a good bet that’s your victim organization.

Image: Unicor.gov

According to Wikipedia, UNICOR is a wholly owned United States government corporation created in 1934 that uses penal labor from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to produce goods and services. It is apparently restricted to selling its products and services to federal government agencies, although recently private companies gained some access to UNICOR workforce. For instance, companies can outsource call centers to UNICOR. Case in point: If you call UNICOR’s main number off-hours, the voicemail message states that during business hours your call may be handled by an inmate! Continue reading →

Critical Flaws in Apple, Samsung Devices

June 17, 2015

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Normally, I don’t cover vulnerabilities about which the user can do little or nothing to prevent, but two newly detailed flaws affecting hundreds of millions of Android, iOS and Apple products probably deserve special exceptions.

The first is a zero-day bug in iOS and OS X that allows the theft of both Keychain (Apple’s password management system) and app passwords. The flaw, first revealed in an academic paper (PDF) released by researchers from Indiana University, Peking University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, involves a vulnerability in Apple’s latest operating system versions that enable an app approved for download by the Apple Store to gain unauthorized access to other apps’ sensitive data.

“More specifically, we found that the inter-app interaction services, including the keychain…can be exploited…to steal such confidential information as the passwords for iCloud, email and bank, and the secret token of Evernote,” the researchers wrote.

The team said they tested their findings by circumventing the restrictive security checks of the Apple Store, and that their attack apps were approved by the App Store in January 2015. According to the researchers, more than 88 percent of apps were “completely exposed” to the attack.

News of the research was first reported by The Register, which said that Apple was initially notified in October 2014 and that in February 2015 the company asked researchers to hold off disclosure for six months.

“The team was able to raid banking credentials from Google Chrome on the latest Mac OS X 10.10.3, using a sandboxed app to steal the system’s keychain and secret iCloud tokens, and passwords from password vaults,” The Register wrote. “Google’s Chromium security team was more responsive and removed Keychain integration for Chrome noting that it could likely not be solved at the application level. AgileBits, owner of popular software 1Password, said it could not find a way to ward off the attacks or make the malware ‘work harder’ some four months after disclosure.”

A story at 9to5mac.com suggests the malware the researchers created to run their experiments can’t directly access existing keychain entries, but instead does so indirectly by forcing users to log in manually and then capturing those credentials in a newly-created entry.

“For now, the best advice would appear to be cautious in downloading apps from unknown developers – even from the iOS and Mac App Stores – and to be alert to any occasion where you are asked to login manually when that login is usually done by Keychain,” 9to5’s Ben Lovejoy writes.

SAMSUNG KEYBOARD FLAW

Separately, researchers at mobile security firm NowSecure disclosed they’d found a serious vulnerability in a third-party keyboard app that is pre-installed on more than 600 million Samsung mobile devices — including the recently released Galaxy S6 — that allows attackers to remotely access resources like GPS, camera and microphone, secretly install malicious apps, eavesdrop on incoming/outgoing messages or voice calls, and access pictures and text messages on vulnerable devices. Continue reading →

Password Manager LastPass Warns of Breach

June 16, 2015

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LastPass, a company that offers users a way to centrally manage all of their passwords online with a single master password, disclosed Monday that intruders had broken into its databases and made off with user email addresses and password reminders, among other data.

In an alert posted to its blog, LastPass said the company has found no evidence that its encrypted user vault data was taken, nor that LastPass user accounts were accessed.

“The investigation has shown, however, that LastPass account email addresses, password reminders, server per user salts, and authentication hashes were compromised,” the company said. “We are confident that our encryption measures are sufficient to protect the vast majority of users. LastPass strengthens the authentication hash with a random salt and 100,000 rounds of server-side PBKDF2-SHA256, in addition to the rounds performed client-side. This additional strengthening makes it difficult to attack the stolen hashes with any significant speed.”

Parsing LastPass’s statement requires a basic understanding of the way that passwords are generally stored. Passwords are “hashed” by taking the plain text password and running it against a theoretically one-way mathematical algorithm that turns the user’s password into a string of gibberish numbers and letters that is supposed to be challenging to reverse.

The weakness of this approach is that hashes by themselves are static, meaning that the password “123456,” for example, will always compute to the same password hash. To make matters worse, there are plenty of tools capable of very rapidly mapping these hashes to common dictionary words, names and phrases, which essentially negates the effectiveness of hashing. These days, computer hardware has gotten so cheap that attackers can easily and very cheaply build machines capable of computing tens of millions of possible password hashes per second for each corresponding username or email address.

But by adding a unique element, or “salt,” to each user password, database administrators can massively complicate things for attackers who may have stolen the user database and rely upon automated tools to crack user passwords.

“What a salt does it makes it hard to go after a lot of passwords at once as opposed to one users’ password, because every user requires a separate guess and that separate guess is going to take a considerable amount of time,” said Steve Bellovin, a professor in computer science at Columbia University . “With a salt, even if a bunch of users have the same password, like ‘123456,’ everyone would have a different hash.”

More concerning in this particular breach, Bellovin said, is that users’ password reminders also were stolen.

Continue reading →

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